Dürer / Artist-Biographies

The Riverside Press, Cambridge.
1879.
Copyright. By JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO. 1877.
FRANKLIN PRESS: RAND, AVERY, AND COMPANY, BOSTON.
The growth of a popular interest in art and its history has been very rapid during the last decade of American life, and is still in progress. This interest is especially directed towards the lives of artists themselves; and a general demand exists for a uniform series of biographies of those most eminent, which shall possess the qualities of reliability, compactness, and cheapness.
To answer this demand the present series has been projected. The publishers have intrusted its preparation to Mr. M. F. Sweetser, whose qualities of thoroughness in research and fidelity in statement have been proved in other fields of authorship. It is believed that by the omission of much critical and discursive matter commonly found in art biographies, an account of an artist’s life may be presented, which is at once truthful and attractive, within the limits prescribed for these volumes.
The series will be published at the rate of one or two volumes each month, at 50 cents each volume, and will contain the lives of the most famous artists of mediæval and modern times. It will include the lives of many of the following:—

This little volume presents an account of the life of one of the noblest and most versatile artists of Germany, with a passing glance at the activities of Northern Europe at the era of the Reformation. The weird and wonderful paintings of Dürer are herein concisely described, as well as the most famous and characteristic of his engravings and carvings; and his quaint literary works are enumerated. It has also been thought advisable to devote considerable space to details about Nuremberg, the scene of the artist’s greatest labors; and to reproduce numerous extracts from his fascinating Venetian letters and Lowland journals.
The modern theory as to Dürer’s wife and his home has been accepted in this work, after a long and careful examination of the arguments on both sides. It is pleasant thus to be able to aid in the rehabilitation of the much-slandered Agnes, and to have an oppressive cloud of sorrow removed from the memory of the great painter.